Blind Refugee Who Survived Genocide Dies Thanks to Border Patrol

A nearly blind refugee was found dead on the streets of Buffalo, New York, Tuesday after Border Patrol officers dropped him off at a Tim Hortons location miles from home last week.

Nurul Amin Shah Alam, 56, who survived the Rohingya genocide in Burma and arrived in the United States as a refugee in December 2024, was found by Buffalo police Tuesday night after they responded to a report of a dead body. He had been missing since February 19 after being released from the Erie County Holding Center on bail. Since an immigration detainer had been placed on him, the Erie County Sheriff’s Office contacted Border Patrol before his release, and agents picked him up that day.  

Shah Alam had been in the holding center for the past year after he was arrested by Buffalo police while walking in his neighborhood with the help of curtain rods he used as walking sticks. He got lost and found his way to a porch of another person’s home as she was letting her dog out. The woman called the police, and Shah Alam, having poor vision and unable to speak English, didn’t respond to police commands to drop the rods.

A scuffle ensued, and his lawyer, Benjamin Macaluso, said that police beat and tased Shah Alam before arresting him. He was then charged with numerous offenses, including assault, trespassing, and possession of a weapon. Macaluso said that Shah Alam’s family didn’t bail him out at the time for fear that he would be detained by ICE and sent out of state. 

Shah Alam had made a plea deal with the Erie County District Attorney’s Office on charges of trespassing and possessing a weapon, which allowed him to “clear” the detainer, Macaluso told the nonprofit news outlet Investigative Post. So the agents dropped him off at the café, seven miles away from where Alam’s family lives on the east side of Buffalo.

Border Patrol claims that’s where Shah Alam agreed to go. After agents realized that Shah Alam wasn’t supposed to be in their custody, they “offered him a courtesy ride, which he chose to accept to a coffee shop, determined to be a warm, safe location near his last known address, rather than be released directly from the Border Patrol station,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a statement.

The statement even had the audacity to claim that a man blind in one eye, with blurry vision in the other, who needed two sticks to walk, “showed no signs of distress, mobility issues, or disabilities requiring special assistance.”

Border Patrol also didn’t notify Shah Alam’s family that they released him. Macaluso and Shah Alam’s family spent the following few days looking for him, and the attorney opened a missing person’s case with Buffalo police Sunday. On Monday, the case was mistakenly closed for hours because a detective thought Alam was actually taken to an ICE facility before being reopened later that day.

Now, a man who survived a genocide has died because of negligence by Border Patrol agents only 14 months after arriving in the U.S. Even before that, he was arrested and held for a year seemingly because of a miscommunication, and despite having legal status, his family justifiably feared that ICE would detain him thanks to the Trump administration’s reputation of ignoring long-standing immigration law. Shah Alam should still be alive, but thanks to failures from local authorities all the way to the federal government, he passed away on a cold Buffalo street without his family.